Date: March 25th, 2019.
Time: 10:00am.
Place: Roman Baths.
Availability: Open!
You’ll pay the price, they’d warned him.
Maybe it was naivety that kept him from seeing it, or maybe it was arrogance.
I’m neutral, he’d declared, reassuring his worried friends over the phone. I’m an actor, I’m well-known, they wouldn’t risk hurting me. It’s been done before, his rep had argued, begging him to stay low in the Gala’s aftermath. And he’d tried, for Giacomo and Celeste he’d tried - but who could’ve foreseen that trouble would find him in his own home, in the form of a woman he’d mistaken for a friend?...
Everyone, he thinks morosely, trying to ignore his aching body as he slips into the blue-green pool. Everyone saw it but you.
The irony, of course, is that for all the Montagues’ intention to set him straight, all it did was fill him with so much burning resentment that the last thing he felt in relation to them just now, was neutral. No, Tomas thought to himself as the cold water drew up to his elbows, if there was a rightful ruler to this city - a claim he still privately doubted - that position certainly did not belong to Damiano Montague, nor his Dorian Gray-esque son. Not when they’d undoubtedly sicced Pandora and her thugs on him. Not when they’d beaten him black and blue and all for what? - Saving a girl that needed to be saved?...
The environment that surrounds him is peaceful, beautiful. Domed frescoes, marble statues, light filtering gently through the room and playing between pillars; catching tiny specs of dust in its wake... But the actor’s mind is uncharacteristically bleak today; mired to the bottom of a well too far down to see the sun. So when he hears footsteps approaching he braces himself with a sigh. He’s come here to escape the world; up on a hilltop near the city’s outskirts. Quietly, he prays that whoever it is isn’t a Montague.
